With Digital Editions, Less Is More ($)…

There’s a slide we’ve been including in most of our Webinars about digital editions. I call it the "Three Truisms of the Digital Magazine." It says:

A. You will get less traffic in your digital magazine than on your Web site.

B. The traffic you get will stay much longer than on your Web site.

C. The traffic you get will click through at a much higher rate than on your Web site.

When this is the case, the publisher has the ability to charge much more for the ads, particularly in a B-to-B publication. After all, advertisers don’t care how many people SEE their ad. They care how many people CLICK on it.

Recent PubMatic research proves this and is summed up by Chris Anderson: Not only do small (Long Tail) publishers montetize their content at three to five times the rate of the larger publishers in PubMatic’s survey, but they’re improving in the current environment while the big publisher decline.

Rex makes it more relevant for all of us: Online, if you want to monetize content, the number of eyeballs seeing your content is less important than who those eyeballs belong to. And the more helpful that content is in assisting real people make important and valuable decisions, the more “monetizable” it will be.